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Identify Critical Content & Avoid Costly Mistakes

Page Width

  • Visitors DON'T like to scroll side to side.
  • 14" and 15" monitors: Pages should be no wider than 600 pixels across.
  • 17" monitors: Pages should be no wider than 750 pixels across.
  • There are 72 pixels for every inch.

Page Height

  • Long pages require a navigation bar at the top and bottom of the page.
  • Long pages require the use of named anchors.
  • Take the Screen Test
  • Pages should not require more than four screen lengths of scrolling.
  • Place your mouse in the vertical scroll bar and click.
  • Each click of the mouse represents a page length.
  • You should not have to click your mouse in the vertical scroll bar more than four times.

The Home Page

  • This is your visitor's first impression of your site.
  • You have 8-10 seconds to grab your visitor's attention.
  • A person's eye first falls on the top-third section of the page.
  • Place attention-grabbing information at the top-third section of the page.
  • The home page MUST load in 25 seconds or less (test with a 28.8 connection).

Power of Consistency

  • Background colors--white or light pastels
  • Increase font size
  • Link colors--make sure they can be seen on a background. Also some people set their browser for default colors.

The Navigation Bar

  • This should contain no more than 8 choices.
  • Navigation bars with more than 8 choices should be color-coded.
  • Navigation bars with more than 8 choices should be separated into two.
  • Include Contact Information as a main link.
  • Include What's New as a main link if you frequently update more than one page.
  • Include an Index and/or a Site Map if you have more than 75 pages. For example, Adobe's Web Site contains more than 13,000 pages, yet the navigation bar contains only seven main choices.

Contact Information

  • This should be immediately and easily identifiable.
  • Use an autoresponder for e-mail customer service.
  • Respond to customers within one hour.

New Information

  • Provide updated content consistently.
  • Include a time stamp when updating frequently.
  • Make new content immediately identifiable.

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